In order to monitor a physical or logical element on a network a network monitoring system collects information about the functioning of the network elements. The process of determining how a network element is functioning is referred to as “polling” and the software entity performing the determination is referred to as a “poller”. The polling works on a request-response basis with the poller sending requests(“polls”) to the network element (or an agent representing the network element) requesting certain types of information and the network element or agent representing the network element responding (or not responding) to the request with a response that contains all, some or none of the requested information. The collected information, such as performance statistics and settings for the network element, is usually held in specialized objects (e.g.: Management Information Base (MIB) objects) with different network elements supporting different types of objects.